


Dragons and Other Monsters

by bessemerprocess



Series: St. George's Sword verse [1]
Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: CM Kidverse/28th Amendment verse, Child Abuse, Dark, Imagery of Graphic Violence, M/M, Remembering Past Tramatic Events, St. Geroge's Sword verse, Testimony before a Congressional Committee, The 28th Amendment Universe, cm: family verse, executions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-04
Updated: 2010-09-04
Packaged: 2017-10-11 11:29:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/111944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bessemerprocess/pseuds/bessemerprocess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emily Hotchner returns to testify in front the US Congressional committee.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dragons and Other Monsters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [melliyna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melliyna/gifts).



> For melliyna, for the prompt: Kid-Verse/28th Amendment 'Slay all the dragons/and keep out the monsters'.

Emily Hotchner is fourteen when her father is executed. It's not broadcast, but that doesn't stop it from popping up on YouTube within hours. Still, she doesn't see it until she comes back for the Congressional hearings in the aftermath.

She doesn't see him at first, when the huge screen flickers to life, and when she does, she wonders if maybe she should leave the room. She's not sure she can watch her father die surrounded by these people. She may be a witness, but she doesn't have to witness this.

Dad looks the camera in the eye, and she is transfixed, stuck to her seat. The last time she had seen him alive, he'd leaned down and held her tight. He'd said her name and kissed her forehead and said, "I'm sorry. I have to go. I love you," while Papa struggled, handcuffed, against the men holding him. He had tried to keep it together for them, but Dad had looked at him and mouthed, "I will always love you," and that had been the end of Papa's restraint. He'd been held down as Dad had walked out of their house to death, and left them with those men.

She knows now why he did it. That he'd been promised their safety. That he'd been promised that they would stay with Papa, that he'd been promised they would just be deported together. Families like theirs had died in those days. Children like them had been killed. Emily doesn't know why he believed them, but he must have.

On the screen, it's a week before Christmas 2009, and Dad is still alive. He's wearing a suit, and he is freshly shaved. His lips are moving, but she can't hear what he's saying. It might be a Hail Mary, but she can't be sure. The two men holding his elbows aren't paying any attention, and she doesn't recognize either of them. She is abruptly thankful that his own team had not taken him to his death. It had happened: team mates dragging their colleagues to the noose.

It had been worst at Quantico, where the new director had set off a witch hunt that had killed over a thousand FBI agents. He's dead now, died early on, killed by his own men in the second year of the Amendment. The witch hunts hadn't been legal even under Huckabee's regime, but only killing the director had stopped them.

Emily had never met him, but on the screen the director looks young and zealous, watching as the first five men walk up the stairs to the platform where they will be hanged. Dad is in that group, the great David Rossi, author, profiler, gay man. It's the last that's getting him killed. The out men who hadn't already fled were the first victims of the director's witch hunt. Later, it would be others: people suspect of being sympathizers, atheists, Catholics, anyone who made the director even more paranoid than he'd already been.

She's heard more about the later executions, those had taken place in service hallways and group showers. Places with drains the blood could easily be washed down once the victims were shot. In the end, there had been no ceremony, no pomp, just efficient guns and a pile of corpses. On the streets it hadn't been much different, and Emily had seen enough of that to imagine the carnage at the FBI.

This ceremonious procession of death was not at all what she'd been expecting. She'd been told he'd been hung, when her lawyer had told her what evidence would be presented today along with her testimony, but Emily hadn't expected it to seem so much like a performance. She watches as Dad climbs the steps, hesitant, but not panicked. He looks almost detached, and Emily wonders if he's thinking about them and the futures he would miss, or if he is just trying not to think at all. There is no one left to ask now, and she's not sure there is even a future, truly. Either way, every single man who appears in this recording is dead.

The director places the noose around each man's neck, and someone reads from the Bible, and then the lever is pulled and all five men drop to their deaths. Emily turns away, she can't watch this part, and she is glad that Papa never had to.

That night, those men had told them they were going somewhere safe. She remembers Papa kissing them each, there were no hugs from him, because the men had refused to uncuff him, but he'd reminded them each to be good and that he loved them and then stood by as the men made sure they were all buckled in to their seats in the black SUV.

She'd been the oldest: Derek was supposed to fly home from his band camp at Northwestern in a two days to join them for Christmas, but he wasn't there, so she's the one who tells Papa it'll all be okay and that she'll make sure they are all very well behaved and she'll wait for him. She's the one who tells Spencer not to kick the men, and she's the one who tells Pen to stop crying and smile for Papa, and she's the one who tells JJ that Papa will be right behind them, just like the men say, even when she doesn't believe it herself. She gets to hug Papa one last time, and he inhales the scent of her hair and then the men close the car door and she never sees him again.

The pictures from that night are the next piece of evidence, and her lawyer had shown them to her so they wouldn't be a surprise. Which was a good thing, as she'd spent twenty minutes throwing up everything she'd eaten in the last week after seeing them. Emily had known Papa was dead, because nothing besides that would have stopped him from getting them back, but she'd never known how or where until those black and white glossies were slid across the desk to her.

They'd taken the pictures after they'd killed him. One bullet right between the eyes was all it had taken, and Aaron Hotchner had crumpled, dead on his own front lawn. He'd never even made it into that second black SUV, the one she'd always imagined he'd been taken away in.

She's seen the pictures before, but they are blown up so that the whole auditorium and everyone watching on CSPAN can see, and bile claws its way up her throat. Maybe this was a bad idea, maybe she should have stayed away.

That's what JJ had chosen to do. Aaron is two and little David is almost a month old now, and JJ's husband hadn't even wanted to pass her the phone when Emily explained who she was. JJ had spoken to her, told her that her name was Jenna now and promised her pictures of the boys if she could, but they still haven't seen each other in person since that night in the van.

Pen is in prison, and Emily's lawyers hadn't been able to even manage a phone call with her. There's something about crashing the entire traffic system of California that makes the government leery, even if they aren't exactly the government you were protesting. The list of charges against Pen had been six pages long, even in their abbreviated form. The hacking had been at the top, but it seemed her little sister had been a major player in the radical side of the resistance movement: bombings, robbery, and sedition all before her fifteenth birthday. Penelope Hotchner had been a very busy girl.

Derek had also joined the resistance, though his list of crimes were much less spectacular than Pen's: transporting banned literature and misdemeanor blasphemy. After that he'd disappeared. There is simply no record of either a Derek Hotchner or a Derek Morgan in any place her lawyers had searched. She's put his name on every missing relative list she can find, and now all she can do is wait.

Spencer had been her last hope, but because he is still a minor, there is no way to figure out where he has gone. So she's here today by herself to tell this story.

She sits at a desk with her lawyer and the representatives and senators ask her questions that she can't answer and a few that she can. That yes, her parents had been killed. That yes, she'd been taken away from her family and given to a willing foster family who had changed her name to Hannah Grace Garvey and prayed every day for her to be saved. That yes, she had been abused. That yes, she'd run away from them with in the first year and had joined the Cedar Army. That yes, she had mostly worked as a typesetter and editor for underground pamphlets and other literature. That yes, she'd eventually been taken to Canada. It's not the whole story, of course, but it's enough for this purpose. She doesn't talk about being hungry or scared. She doesn't talk about being a lookout while older kids planned, she doesn't talk about carrying a gun, and she doesn't talk about that long trip north and who had gotten her over the border. Mr. Cooper is dead now anyway.

Her story is not unique, but she's one of the few kids who lived through this and can still prove their identity. That's not what she had been thinking when she'd stolen her birth certificate when she'd fled, of course. She'd wanted it because she knew that Papa and Dad had touched it, and it was the only thing of them she'd had left. In the end, it had turned out to be useful as well.

When her testimony is finished, she leaves, unwilling to watch more evidence break her heart. The halls are mostly empty, and she's planning on finding a private spot to break down and cry before she drives her self back to her hotel when someone tugs on her sleeve. "Emily?"

She turns and finds herself facing a teenage boy. She always thought he'd look the same, but the last time she'd seen Spencer he was eight, and he has grown up. He's taller than her now, and his hair is cropped close to his head, but his eyes are the same.

"Spencer," she says, and he pulls her into a hug.

"I can't stay long. My parents--the foster parents, I mean--don't know I'm here. I just, well, this is my email address," Spencer says, and hands her a scrap of paper. "If you're looking me up, the name is Jeremiah Rand, legally. I have to go."

"I will email you," she says into his shoulder as he hugs her again, and then he is gone down the hall and out of sight. Emily opens up the paper and the email address reads: spencersaurusrex@gmail.com.

Maybe, just maybe, there really is a future out there waiting for her.


End file.
